“I hope your complaining isn’t detracting from your focus on the task at hand.”
“What I’m doing is strictly productive bitching, I promise,” he said, without looking up.
He bent down and got to work. Bloch gripped his chair and hunched in so close he could feel her breath on his ear. He knew she understood precisely nothing of what was happening on the screen. But still, she did not move. He couldn’t say he didn’t understand the impulse not to look away.
Decompiling, the first process he was running, was a basic hacking procedure that translated code—essentially, the instructions that tell computers what to do—from the utterly undecipherable computer language of ones and zeroes into programming language that people could manipulate and rewrite. The problem was that original code would always have meaningfully named variables and labels, which would have made understanding it a relatively—the key word being relatively—simple process. Decompiling couldn’t rescue any of those, because they didn’t get translated into computer language. This meant that he was going to have to figure out on his own what all the moving parts did, purely from the structure of the program. And even though he had analyzed these programs at length, and knew what each subroutine was meant to do, it would still take a genius to do it in twenty minutes. Luckily, Lincoln Shepard thought to himself, we have one.
A new window full of text popped up when the decompiling was done. His mind worked at a higher level as he scanned the code newly produced by the decompiler. Things fell into place in his head, moving parts coalescing slowly to form a picture of the whole. With increasing clarity, he saw it. He saw how it worked, and how he was going to make it work for him. He glanced at the clock. Just about six minutes to go. He went to work, applying a scalpel to the code, opening up loopholes in security subroutines, and slowly building the outline of his backdoor. Just a few more lines, and—
“Oh damn,” he said.
“What?”
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” He typed furiously, looking back and forth between the monitors. He had gotten it wrong. One misunderstood variable, and it made most of what he had done so far complete junk.
“What the hell is going on? Shepard, answer me.”
“Just let me work.”
Could he fix it? Yes . . . yes! He saw it. The way out, like a whiff of fresh air in a dank cave. He was going to have to make up for lost time. But he would do it. His fingers moved like the wind, and he saw nothing else. Just variables, abstract symbols swimming around, then locking into place as he set them down. The seconds counted down as he worked, sweating. Shepard blocked out everything else, and went into that entirely abstract zone, where he had no body, just a mind manipulating logical elements. His mind was working three steps ahead of his fingers. He glanced up at the clock on the monitor. The threshold was coming to a close. He just needed one final push. And he was done. This would work. Now it was just a matter of running the compiler....
“Shepard, we’re over the twenty-minute mark,” she said. He looked at the clock, which was now showing 20:13.
“I’m compiling!” The program ran shockingly fast on the Zeta system—but not fast enough.
“Shepard, you need to disconnect!”
“It’s almost done! Uploading . . .”
“We need to disconnect now!”
“Just . . . one . . . more . . . There!” One more hit of the Enter key, and the timer reset. The satellite, to the Chinese, was up and running again, as normal. Everything had been set right back where it had been left, everything but one imperceptible change. And they would be none the wiser that anything had happened until the satellite went down, and then they’d never be able to trace it.
“Shepard. What happened?” asked Bloch.
“I am a goddamn genius, that’s what happened.”
“Did you set the satellite to self-destruct?”
“I did you one better.” He paused for effect. “I built a backdoor. A way in, whenever we want. And that’s not all, there’s more,” he said, in his best imitation of an infomercial. Bloch did not look amused, but he didn’t care. He brought up a fresh screen, filled with varying numbers and graphs—data being beamed down from the satellite. “See? We have full access. Everything they see, we’ll see. Whatever they can order the satellite to do, we can too.”
“And what’s the chance they’ll catch us at it?”
“The way I rigged it? None. I built it into the brick and mortar of the operating system. Like secret passageways in a castle. They can’t detect us there. We can keep downloading information until which time we decide that we want to get rid of it. With just a couple of keystrokes, we can take it over, and then do what we meant to in the first place, and send it to burn up in the atmosphere.”